Tag Archives: gender

1500-word abstract of a paper delivered Sat, Jan 9th, at MLA 2016, in a panel with Deidre Lynch and Andrew Piper. (An article based on this research, and further research with Sabrina Lee, will appear in Cultural Analytics in early 2018.)

By visualizing course evaluations, Ben Schmidt has reminded us how subtly (and irrationally) descriptions of real people are shaped by gendered expectations. Men are praised for being funny, and condemned for being boring. Women are praised for being helpful, and condemned for being strict.

Fictional characters are never simply imagined people; they’re also aspects of novelistic form (Lynch 1998). But gendered patterns of description do appear in fiction, and it might be interesting to know how those patterns have changed. This also happens to be a problem where natural language processing can help us, since English pronouns have grammatical gender. (The gender of “me” is a trickier problem; for the purposes of this paper, we have regretfully set first-person narrators aside.)

We used BookNLP (a pipeline developed in Bamman et al. 2014a) to identify characters and the words connected to them. We applied it to 45,000 works of fiction distributed (unevenly) over the period 1780-1989. (The works themselves were partly drawn from HathiTrust and partly located at the Chicago Text Lab.) BookNLP does make errors (Vala et al., 2015), and any analysis on this scale will miss a great deal that is implied rather than said. But readers are so interested in character that it may be worth putting up with some gaps and uncertainties in order to glimpse broad historical patterns.

We asked, first, how strongly characterization is shaped by gender, and how that pressure waxed or waned across time. For instance, if you didn’t have names or pronouns, or tautological clues like “her Ladyship” and “her girlhood,” how easy would it be to infer a character’s (grammatical) gender from the apparently-genderless verbs, nouns, and adjectives associated with her?

One way to find out is to train a model to predict gender just from those implicit clues, testing it against the ground truth established by pronouns. When we do this, a long-term trend is perceptible: the linguistic differences between male and female characters get clearer to the middle of the nineteenth century, and then slowly get blurrier, through at least the 1980s.

Boxplots for 12 regularized logistic models in each decade; each model included 750 male and 750 female characters, randomly selected with the proviso that the median character size was always 51 words, and characters with less than 15 words were excluded.

It’s not a huge or dramatic shift, partly because gender is never easy to infer in the first place. (Since the model could get 50% of the characters right by guessing randomly, 74% is not eagle-eyed. Of course, the median character was only associated with 51 words, which is not a lot of evidence to go on.)

There are also questions about the data that make it difficult to be confident about details. We have sparse data before 1810, so we’re not certain yet that gender was really less clearly marked in the eighteenth century — although Virginia Woolf does tell us that “the sexes drew further and further apart” as the nineteenth century began (Woolf 1992: 219).

Also, after 1923, our dataset gets a little more American and a little better at excluding reprints, so the apparent acceleration of change from 1910 to 1930 might partly reflect changes in the corpus. In the final draft, we plan to check multiple corpora against each other. But we don’t have much doubt about the broad trend from 1840 to 1989. Over that century and a half, the boundary that separates “men” and “women” in fiction does seem to get blurrier and blurrier.

What were the tacit patterns that made it possible to predict a character’s gender in the first place, and how did they change? That’s a big question; there’s room here for several decades of discussion.

But some of the broadest patterns are easy to grasp. For each word, you can measure the difference between its frequency in descriptions of women and of men. (In the graphs below, words above zero are more common in descriptions of women.) Then you can sort the words to find ones where the difference between genders is large early in the period, and declines over time.

When you do that, you find a lot of words that describe subjective consciousness and emotion; most of them are attributed to women. “Passion” is an exception used more often for men; of course, in the early nineteenth century, it often means “lust.”

This evidence tends to support Nancy Armstrong’s contention in Desire and Domestic Fiction that subjectivity was to begin with “a female domain” in the novel (Armstrong 4), although it puts the peak of this phenomenon a little later than she suggests.

But in general, the gendering of subjectivity is a pattern that will be familiar to scholars of the novel. So, probably, is the tension between public and private space revealed here. Throughout the nineteenth century, it’s “her chamber” and “her room,” but “his country.” Around 1925, houses switch owners.

The convergence of all these lines on the right side of the graph helps explain why our models find gender harder and harder to predict: many of the words you might use to predict it are becoming less common (or becoming more evenly balanced between men and women — the graphs we’ve presented here don’t yet distinguish those two sorts of change.) On balance, that’s the prevailing trend. But there are also a few implicitly gendered forms of description that do increase. In particular, physical description becomes more important in fiction (Heuser and Le-Khac 2012).

From the Famous Artists’ School course materials. “The male head is square and angular, with a strong jaw.”

And as writers spend more time describing their characters physically, some aspects of the body and dress also become more important as signifiers of gender. This isn’t a simple, monolithic process. There are parts of the body whose significance seems to peak at a certain date and then level off — like the masculine jaw, maybe peaking around 1950?

Other signifiers of masculinity — like the chest, and incidentally pockets — continue to become more and more important. For women, the “eyes” and “face” peak very markedly around 1890. But hair has rarely been more gendered (or bigger) than it was in the 1980s.

The measures we’re using here are simple, and deliberately conflate sheer frequency with gendered-ness in order to highlight words that have both attributes. We may use a wider range of interpretive strategies in the final article. But it’s clear already that gender has been unstable, not just because the implicit gendering of characterization became blurrier overall from 1840 to 1989 — but because the specific clues associated with gender have been rather volatile. In other words, gender is not at all the same thing in 1980 that it was in 1840.

There’s nothing very novel about the discovery that gender is fluid. But of course, we like to say everything is fluid: genres, roles, geographies. The advantage of a comparative method is that it lets us say specifically what we mean. Fluid compared to what? For instance, the increasing blurriness of gender boundaries is a kind of change we don’t see when we model the boundary between detective fiction and other genres: that boundary remains remarkably stable from 1841 to 1989. So we can say the linguistic signs of gender in characterization are more mutable than at least some genres.

We didn’t have to start with a complex data model to find this fluidity. Our initial representation of gender was a naive binary one, borrowed casually from English grammar. But we still ended up discovering that the things associated with those binary reference points have been in practice very changeable.

Other approaches are possible. The model Underwood has used to define genre (in a forthcoming piece) is messy and perspectival from the get-go, patched together from different sources of testimony. A project working with appropriate kinds of evidence could, similarly, build a perspectival dimension into definitions of gender from the very outset (for inspiration see Posner 2015 and Bamman et al. 2014b). But the point of research is also to discover things that weren’t hard-coded in the original plan. Even a perspectival model of genre may end up finding that different sources actually agree, for instance, about the boundaries of detective fiction. Conversely, even naively grammatical gender categories may start to bend and blur if they’re stretched across a two-century timeline.

Acknowledgements. This project was made possible by generous support from the NovelTM project, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. The authors would like to acknowledge work in progress at NovelTM as an influence on their thinking, including especially a forthcoming project by Matthew L. Jockers and Gabi Kirilloff. Our models of the twentieth century depend on collections located at the Chicago Text Lab, and supported by the University of Chicago Knowledge Lab. Eleanor Courtemanche suggested the connection to Woolf. BookNLP is available on github; work planned for this year at HathiTrust Research Center will make it possible for scholars to apply it to fiction even beyond the wall of copyright.

References:

Armstrong, Nancy. 1987. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. New York: Oxford University Press.

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers is an odd venue for literary history, and our paper ends up touching so many disciplinary bases that it may be distracting.* So I thought I’d pull out four issues of interest to humanists and discuss them briefly here; I’m also taking the occasion to add a little information about gender that we uncovered too late to include in the paper itself.

1) The overall point about genre. Our title, “Mapping Mutable Genres in Structurally Complex Volumes,” may sound like the sort of impossible task heroines are assigned in fairy tales. But the paper argues that the blurry mutability of genres is actually a strong argument for a digital approach to their history. If we could start from some consensus list of categories, it would be easy to crowdsource the history of genre: we’d each take a list of definitions and fan out through the archive. But centuries of debate haven’t yet produced stable definitions of genre. In that context, the advantage of algorithmic mapping is that it can be comprehensive and provisional at the same time. If you change your mind about underlying categories, you can just choose a different set of training examples and hit “run” again. In fact we may never need to reach a consensus about definitions in order to have an interesting conversation about the macroscopic history of genre.

2) A workset of 32,209 volumes of English-language fiction. On the other hand, certain broad categories aren’t going to be terribly controversial. We can probably agree about volumes — and eventually specific page ranges — that contain (for instance) prose fiction and nonfiction, narrative and lyric poetry, and drama in verse, or prose, or some mixture of the two. (Not to mention interesting genres like “publishers’ ads at the back of the volume.”) As a first pass at this problem, we extract a workset of 32,209 volumes containing prose fiction from a collection of 469,200 eighteenth- and nineteenth-century volumes in HathiTrust Digital Library. The metadata for this workset is publicly available from Illinois’ institutional repository. More substantial page-level worksets will soon be produced and archived at HathiTrust Research Center.

3) The declining prevalence of first-person narration. Once we’ve identified this fiction workset, we switch gears to consider point of view — frankly, because it’s a temptingly easy problem with clear literary significance. Though the fiction workset we’re using is defined more narrowly than it was last February, we confirm the result I glimpsed at that point, which is that the prevalence of first-person point of view declines significantly toward the end of the eighteenth century and then remains largely stable for the nineteenth.

Mean probability that fiction is written in first person, 1700-1899. Based on a corpus of 32,209 volumes of fiction extracted from HathiTrust Digital Library. Points are mean probabilities for five-year spans of time; a trend line with standard errors has been plotted with loess smoothing.

We can also confirm that result in a way I’m finding increasingly useful, which is to test it in a collection of a completely different sort. The HathiTrust collection includes reprints, which means that popular works have more weight in the collection than a novel printed only once. It also means that many volumes carry a date much later than their first date of publication. In some ways this gives a more accurate picture of print culture (an approximation to “what everyone read,” to borrow Scott Weingart’s phrase), but one could also argue for a different kind of representativeness, where each volume would be included only once, in a record dated to its first publication (an attempt to represent “what everyone wrote”).

Mean probability that fiction is written in first person, 1700-1899. Based on a corpus of 774 volumes of fiction selected by multiple hands from multiple sources. Plotted in 20-year bins because n is smaller here. Works are weighted by the number of words they contain.

Fortunately, Jordan Sellers and I produced a collection like that a few years ago, and we can run the same point-of-view classifier on this very different set of 774 fiction volumes (metadata available), selected by multiple hands from multiple sources (including TCP-ECCO, the Brown Women Writers Project, and the Internet Archive). Doing that reveals broadly the same trend line we saw in the HathiTrust collection. No collection can be absolutely representative (for one thing, because we don’t agree on what we ought to be representing). But discovering parallel results in collections that were constructed very differently does give me some confidence that we’re looking at a real trend.

4. Gender and point of view. In the process of classifying works of fiction, we stumbled on interesting thematic patterns associated with point of view. Features associated with first-person perspective include first-person pronouns, obviously, but also number words and words associated with sea travel. Some of this association may be explained by the surprising persistence of a particular two-century-long genre, the Robinsonade. A castaway premise obviously encourages first-person narration, but the colonial impulse in the Robinsonade also seems to have encouraged acquisitive enumeration of the objects (goats, barrels, guns, slaves) its European narrators find on ostensibly deserted islands. Thus all the number words. (But this association of first-person perspective with colonial settings and acquisitive enumeration may well extend beyond the boundaries of the Robinsonade to other genres of adventure fiction.)

Third-person perspective, on the other hand, is durably associated with words for domestic relationships (husband, lover, marriage). We’re still trying to understand these associations; they could be consequences of a preference for third-person perspective in, say, courtship fiction. But third-person pronouns correlate particularly strongly with words for feminine roles (girl,daughter,woman) — which suggests that there might also be a more specifically gendered dimension to this question.

Since transmitting our paper to the IEEE I’ve had a chance to investigate this hypothesis in the smaller of the two collections we used for that paper — 774 works of fiction between 1700 and 1899: 521 by men, 249 by women, and four not characterized by gender. (Mike Black and Jordan Sellers recorded this gender data by hand.) In this collection, it does appear that male writers choose first-person perspective significantly more than women do. The gender gap persists across the whole timespan, although it might be fading toward the end of the nineteenth century.

Proportion of works of fiction by men and women in first person. Based on the same set of 774 volumes described above. (This figure counts strictly by the number of works rather than weighting works by the number of words they contain.)

Over the whole timespan, women use first person in roughly 23% of their works, and men use it in roughly 35% of their works.** That’s not a huge difference, but in relative terms it’s substantial. (Men are using first person 52% more than women). The Bayesian mafia have made me wary of p-values, but if you still care: a chi-squared test on the 2×2 contingency table of gender and point of view gives p < 0.001. (Attentive readers may already be wondering whether the decline of first person might be partly explained by an increase in the proportion of women writers. But actually, in this collection, works by women have a distribution that skews slightly earlier than that of works by men.)

These are very preliminary results. 774 volumes is a small set when you could test 32,209. At the recent HTRC Uncamp, Stacy Kowalczyk described a method for gender identification in the larger HathiTrust corpus, which we will be eager to borrow once it’s published. Also, the mere presence of an association between gender and point of view doesn’t answer any of the questions literary critics will really want to pose about this phenomenon — like, why is point of view associated with gender? Is this actually a direct consequence of gender, or is it an indirect consequence of some other variable like genre? Does this gendering of narrative perspective really fade toward the end of the nineteenth century? I don’t pretend to have answered any of those questions, all I’m doing here is flagging the existence of an interesting open question that will deserve further inquiry.

** We don’t actually represent point of view as a binary choice between first person or third person; the classifier reports probabilities as a continuous range between 0 and 1. But for purposes of this blog post I’ve simplified by dividing the works into two sets at the 0.5 mark. On this point, and for many other details of quantitative methodology, you’ll want to consult the paper itself.